Stuart Ross

The Good Cop Problem: On Melanie Anagnos' Nightswimming - The Metropolitan Review “Two of the big knocks against crime fiction,” according to writer Sam Wiebe, “[are] that it glamorizes the police and fetishizes female victims.” These are fair knocks, but also the very pitfalls tha...

I have a new piece in TNR on Melanie Anagnos’ *Nightswimming* which you should check out after reading my piece.

metropolitanreview.com/the-good-cop...

Happy one year anniversary to The Hotel Egypt! Buy it here or anywhere, or DM for a copy.

www.spuytenduyvil.net/The-Hotel-Eg...

Keith Gessen says the same in “Money (2014)” from MFA vs: NYC: “In fact what I most wanted was to be told, by a writer, that I was myself a writer, that I had it.”

I showed up on a podcast promoting The Hotel Egypt. Thanks to Danny and the UnTaking!

When you're such a bad-ass writer Anna K. and Sabbath server as "soothing reminders"

Baseball, Autofiction, and the American Psyche A Cubs game, a podcast, and a Fourth of July riff on art, satire, Exodus, and the rituals that make (and unmake) American life.

New writing:

substack.com/home/post/p-...

New writing in da stacks

“The only time a writer receives his due reward is when someone comes to him burning with this flame which he fanned in a moment of solitude. Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.”

— Henry Miller

Mountainhead proves Succession wasn't that good.

The most terrifying part of scrolling is getting to the untranslatable Japanese word we need in English.

The Trump administration makes no sense unless we're in the streets.

if i could snap my fingers and force all journalists everywhere to implement one linguistic tic i think i'd mandate "cars (which kill more than 3,000 people every day)"

He died of lung cancer at 33

So weird to me ppl pretend it takes two years for a book to come out when you could just post the PDF to a dropbox and be like, here's my book.

The Lucy Dacus to Cranberries cafe background noise transition. Makes me want to listen to their child, Julie Doiron.

Incident In Jazz Robert F. Graettinger, Ebony Band Amsterdam, Gunther Schuller · City Of Glass · Song · 2006

Robert Graettinger composed in poverty and seclusion and was soon forgotten after he died in 1957. Aspects of his works’ internal struggles would preoccupy Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane.

open.spotify.com/track/14BeJC...

You’ve been in the house too long she said, so I naturally placed a Starbucks mobile order for an Impossible sandwich without cheese.

Race Book (125p-108k) People would be more interesting...

People would be more interesting if they weren’t always trying to get so much “quality sleep.” I wish I had more hair on my calves. I take the arrival of a cat on my lap as a sign of humility. I wish Juan Soto were still on the Bombers.

pebbleculture.substack.com/p/race-book-...

Ambivalence, Indiana (French Lick) She was at a gas station, filling up a jug for the tractor.

New fiction, "Ambivalence, Indiana (French Lick)" on something I've always wonder about: when movie stars fly to Indiana for playoff games, what happens to them in Indiana?

substack-proxy.glitch.me/articles/peb...

If Dave Eggers blurbed a book I know it’s probably good and I know I’m probably not going to read it.

It’s weird that New Yorkers sit in FDR traffic staring at a gray river and Chicagoans sit in LSD traffic staring at the cerulean blur of Lake Michigan.

Tik-Tok is the most desperate app in the app store.

“But I couldn’t help wishing its author took more risks. ‘Great writers of fiction,’ Arnold Bennett tells us, ‘are by the mysterious nature of their art ordained to be amateurs.’ The author of The Sleepers is many things, but an amateur isn’t one of them.”

Great review by a great writer!

Alice Notley, Bolinas, California, 1971.

“Right wing literature, amirite?” content is the Banana Republic Factory Outlet Henley of our time.

Everyone has read everything. The craft question becomes, can you write about everything that you have read.

YouTube video by The Eames Era - Topic Dear Gabby

"Shoefly girls, you gotta work for it
Emo kids, you don't tip for shit
Grad school groupies, you can wait another year
'Cause it's bad when you go, but it's not as bad as when you're here."

The Eames Era - "Dear Gabby" (2007)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3rY...

Alice Notley (1945-2025) on poetry.

New York Groove (37+1) The Sleepers: Insomnia edition

More writing on The Sleepers. You won't want to miss this. A piece a little bit more vulnerable than I usually am.

pebbleculture.substack.com/p/new-york-g...